Editorial: State wastes chance to enhance recycling

A "new" Bigger Better Bottle Bill would have been an improvement to laws passed previously by the state legislature, and it should have made its way into a final budget agreement this year.

But it is not going to be included - and that is a great detriment to New York's environmental efforts.

The state's bottle law was originally passed in 1982 and bolstered in 2009. The latest version would have expanded the current 5-cent container deposit law to include juice, iced tea and sports drink containers, in addition to the deposits already given on the beer, soda, wine coolers and water bottles.

Essentially, the 5-cent container deposit goes a long way toward getting the plastic and glass containers off the street and out of landfills. As revised in 2009, the law requires beverage companies to return the unclaimed deposits to the state to fund recycling and other environmental protection programs.

Some customers, of course, return the empty containers and reclaim their nickels, but the state nevertheless collects about $115 million a year in unclaimed deposits as a result of this law.

While lawmakers are opting not to expand the bottle bill this year, they are transferring about $19 million from unclaimed container deposits to the state Environmental Protection Fund.

This fund - which has been cut during the recession - pays for a range of environmental projects at the local level. It is one of the state's most effective ways to collaborate with counties and towns and environmental groups to save farmland and other open spaces from being developed.

In Dutchess County, for example, the fund has supported the purchase of protection of land through conservation easements at Sunset Ridge Farm in the Town of North East and Bos Haven Farm in the Town of Union Vale. Money from the EPF also has gone to environmental cleanups so cities like Poughkeepsie along the Hudson River can clean up blighted industrial areas and lure new business and development.

Increasing the environmental fund is a sound decision, for both environmental and economic reasons. But expanding the bottle law would provide the state with more revenues that ultimately could make their way into the environment fund. The state's stop-gap approach is better than nothing, but it's far from ideal.

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Editorial: State wastes chance to enhance recycling

A 'new' Bigger Better Bottle Bill would have been an improvement to laws passed previously by the state legislature, and it should have made its way into a final budget agreement this year.